


chasing fires

by peaksykid



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Bisexual Paula Turnip, F/F, Ghost Story Breakup Story, Smoking, blaseball-typical canon deaths, brief fade to black hookup but nothing explicit, implied Paula Turnip/Landry Violence but only if you want it could be platonic too, messy relationship, season-4 typical tigers-crabs trash talk, spans from s3 to s9dX, that bit’s just important to my hc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:28:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28274589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peaksykid/pseuds/peaksykid
Summary: It’s like this--you see her hanging out in the locker room after your first practice and you try to introduce yourself, and she doesn’t tell you her name, just grins, and walks off, twirling that cord around her fingers.In your first game, she hits a two-run homer right off the bat, and you can still hear the ringing once the game’s over. You don’t ask about her name again.
Relationships: Paula Turnip/Jessica Telephone
Comments: 8
Kudos: 18





	chasing fires

It’s like this: you have never left your hometown. You grew up here and you like it just the way it is, but your life itself could use some work. You’ve never seen a sun other than the hazy oval of Erebus, setting just to the west, and you mark seasons by when you can get pomegranates in the market. 

You pass danger in the street all the time. You have long stopped trying to remember the names of all your family’s associates, and even longer since stopped trying to avoid them. You pick up errands for them sometimes, “errands” for them other times. You wash dirt and blood and oil alike off your hands calmly, too calmly, till you get tired of it. You never do the work yourself. There’s a monotony and a structure to these things, that both sickens and disinterests you, and you hate the taste of roast vegetables around the table.

You want out, you practice saying in the mirror. You envision your mother on the other side of it, the wrinkles in her face, the leaves on the tips of her hair shriveling in anger. You find a part of yourself quails at the chance, and kick your feet like it will get you moving, like a stubborn horse. You sigh and you fuss and you open the closet to find something to wear.

The jacket is blue.

\----

It’s like this—it’s like drinking fire. It’s like this—you feel sparks behind your eyes arching up like a crown, like antlers. It’s like this—it’s nothing, really, just permission, to do what you want, to do what you need to do, to be action, motion, the follow-through, the second after the second.  _ Violence _ .

It’s like this—he’s got an aura of red lightning and a voice that rumbles like thunder, and you do too, now, and you tell your mother and all her glitzy friends at the dinner party downstairs that you’re going to play blaseball for the Hades Tigers. And your eyes are scarlet and orange and gold and black, and that big mirror with the gilding around the edges that your mother keeps over the door shows the whole gathering the roaring face on your back, and they know better than to tell you no.

In the future, you’ll reach back to those first few days with an outstretched hand with ash under the fingernails. While they’re happening, they’re glorious. There is a rush that comes with all connections, a kindling spark of a fire and you are no different, firewood of a girl, with pine needles behind your ears singed orange brown from the bolts that sneak past your eyes. It’s like every fairy tale you’ve ever seen, except without a princess or a prince or a castle and with a girl who runs wild down the hills and a stormy bright spirit lifting her past stopping into moving, into  _ being _ . So maybe not like a fairy tale at all.

You run out in a storm with him, or maybe he runs and you follow at a distance far above your body before being pulled in by gravity. Your body tumbles down the slope with mud and grass all over in your coiled hair and you both land at the bottom, cloud over shadow, fire over earth, thunder following lightning, and above is the silhouette of his antlers and the sharpness of those teeth.

You are more in control than people assume you are. You are having the time of your life every moment. You are holding on for dear life every moment. Both things are equally true. He asks if you’ve ever done this before, and you laugh a little nervously, and say, “what, been possessed?” And he laughs too, sharp edged and deep, and says, “no, played blaseball.”

You used to play a little bit when you were a kid in school, you say, but never actually got into blittle league, or anything like that. He makes sure your hands fall on the bat in the right way, and tells you you’re going to need to run, and fast, because he hits them hard and strong but doesn’t always think where he’s hitting. You ask him why he’s telling you this, and he says he figures you should know.

It takes a moment, a surprisingly fast moment, to get used to the motion. You are a shadow running behind a body, when he has the wheel, and there is something exhilarating about it. Like a banner pulled behind a plane, like a trampled path through the woods that something too-fast with hooves plowed through. 

You figure he won’t stick with you forever (the thought makes something in you seize, to imagine the split, and you wonder if it’s some possession residue or if you just fall for people too fast), but you selfishly hope for a longer run. You like the sound behind your voice and you like falling asleep with the heavy denim of the jacket around your shoulders knowing you will never be alone.

You meet the rest of the team in the dugout a couple of days before the postseason starts. You never did pay much attention to splorts, and you have very little idea who these people are. The right fielder is a tiger-shaped demon with biceps the size of your head, the player in front of you in the batting order is a six foot tall shark-person with teeth that glint like the moon and there’s a part of you that thinks you should feel intimidated but the other part, the other part that smirks back at you now whenever you catch your red-outlined reflection in a mirror, tells you to stay right where you are, and that you belong here with the rest of them.

When you need to, you know their names like you always have known them, because Landry knows them, he’s been here since the team got back on its feet again, he tells you, and they all crack jokes with him and he responds in your voice and you pay attention to what he says in order to try and figure out the dynamics. The one with a book for a head keeps an eye out for the others when they’re lagging behind. The pitcher with the faces in his coat has an ego rivaled only by your spirit’s own. The guy in the suit of armor is friendly and will bat anyone on in to home.

The girl who comes after you in the rotation…

It’s like this--you see her hanging out in the locker room after your first practice and you try to introduce yourself (a rare moment with the jacket off, he’s got business to attend to) and she doesn’t tell you her name, just grins, and walks off, twirling that cord around her fingers. You have the strangest sense that it’s like seeing an expensive coat in a store and not finding a price tag--if you have to ask about it, it must not be for you.

You ask Landry, still, and he laughs, one of his rumbling chuckles that you can feel down somewhere in your throat. 

“I see you’ve met Jess,” he says. “I always liked her. She’s got a fire to her.”

In your first game, she hits a two-run homer right off the bat, and you can still hear the ringing once the game’s over. You don’t ask about her name again.

\----

It’s like this--Fish, then you, then her. They all scream and yell for them and for her when they come up to bat, and they have all the chants in the world for Landry, and there’s a part of you that hums with electricity to hear them, but nobody knows your name. You’re alright with it, for now, but you wonder what it would be like to hear it. You wonder if that’s where she gets it, the confidence. 

You see the sun, the real sun, for the first time, in the postseason. You have to admit that it’s kind of underwhelming. You’re not sure if that’s just because Landry’s seen it plenty before, and is unimpressed, or whether you just like the gloom and red glow of Hades better than anything else. You sit at a cafe in Philadelphia and order two coffees--a macchiato for Landry and a coffee with cream and sugar for yourself. You drink his first.

“Jess likes macchiatos, too,” he says, offhandedly, and you nearly spit out hot liquid.

“Shut uppppppp--”

“I’m literally possessing you. You can’t hide these things from me, honey.”

“Don’t you honey me.” You roll your eyes, which no one can see behind the red glow, but you don’t really mind it.

“Listen, I can tell you’re thinking about her. You should talk to her! Worst comes to worst, you can blame me, and she’ll just blow it off as Violence being a nuisance again.”

“I’m not doing that.”

“Mh-hmm.” You can’t see him, but he’s grinning.

You’re playing in New York next week. Landry keeps joking that he’s going to climb the Empire State Building like King Klong and make it storm so he can recharge his energies. You tell him he better find someone else to possess if he’s going to throw himself around like that. Your hand twirls your hair around your fingers mockingly, while he still reassures you that, why, he would never. 

You press your face to the window of the team bus on the way in and can barely feel the coldness of the glass. When you lift it up again, it’s warped and grainy, shot through with the lightning. You ask whether that was really necessary and your arms shrug, and you sigh. You can’t take him anywhere.

The night before, you ask Landry if he’s ever made it to the finals.

“Would you believe I haven’t? I know, right?” He leans back on his heels somewhere, confident as always. You wrap the jacket closer around yourself. “Suppose it will be a first for the both of us.”

\----

It’s like this-- You lose the first game 2-7.

The second game--

You remember how he told you you’d have to run fast.

In the moments after, you don’t stop running.

\----

It’s like this--she doesn’t offer sympathy, like the rest of them, and there’s something reassuring about that. She doesn’t pretend to know you. 

But that means that there’s a chance for her to get to know you, now. You still come before her in the batting rotation. You still batted before her through the rest of the championship--the championship you  _ won,  _ you think, ring on its little chain around your neck clinking against the metal of your bat. She has no reason, really, to ignore you.

You notice things. Her hair is like something out of an old commercial--fluffy and curly and blonde and yet somehow never ever out of place. Somewhere in between breaks in practice--there’s a week or so between the end of the finals and when the votes are all counted for the election, and Fearful Symmetry doesn’t want anyone getting rusty--she comes back to the field drenched in saltwater and offers you a fruit from some far-flung island and says she got it from a pirate ship in the year 1680. This is her way, you suppose, of trying to be nice. 

You take a bite of it and the juice drips down your chin, something red, and you can tell she’s watching it. You take a long time to wipe it off.

“Do people really pronounce it like Persephone, or was Famous just fucking with me?” you ask, one day.

She smiles and there’s a glint to her teeth. “Sometimes.”

It’s like this--Landry wasn’t lying. There is a fire to her. You can’t help but pick up on it. It’s a different sort of fire, and you think that if you could see it it would change its color all the time, but still stay bright.

She’s got a brother out in Texas, she says, offhandedly. She asks about your family and you brush it off but not well enough and she wants all the details and you can’t help but spill. You embellish a little when you talk about the gunfights and rum-running and scandal and she whistles a long high tone in surprised interest.

“Got more story in there than I expected,” and she grins, and her teeth are too white and blunt-edged, but you like her smile anyways.

You get curious--you’re getting coffee with her and your eyes keep flitting between her red lipstick and the curlycue pattern the barista made of her macchiato and the stain on the rim of the mug. You ask why she didn’t talk to you back when you first introduced yourself to her. She tilts her head like it’s obvious.

“Landry’s hosts don’t usually stick around for more than a game or two,” she says. “I figured you wanted an autograph or something before you went, but you just stood there. So I left.”

For some reason, this doesn’t offend you. It probably should. Instead, it makes you want to prove you’re worth her while.

It’s like this—you know you fall for people fast and you know your eyes can’t stop tracing the downward spiral of that phone cord at her hip. You can guess she falls fast too, cause people say she’s had more romances than decades she’s been to and you aren’t from SIBR but the math doesn’t add up. There’s something musical in the way she talks, something that makes you wanna keep on listening and never hang up.

She’s got an apartment in Hades with repeated prints of some singer you’ve never heard of hanging on the wall above her bed. The blinds let the evening orange light inside in stripes. She falls heavy on the blankets and you summon your courage best you can and she promises, in a voice sweet and silver, that she won’t let go.

\---

It’s like this—you hold your breath on first base and wait for the sound of the dial.

It’s like this—she always follows.

\----

You don’t really pay attention to what goes on in LA. You’ve heard some weird things. The day of the elections, you see some weird things, too, but you don’t pay it much mind. The team’s a lot more worried about other things. Like whether the Crabs are going to try and steal Jess.

“Have you ever been to Baltimore?” Jess asks you, leaning her right hand on her right cheek (there are no buttons on that one.) “I’ve heard it’s awful. I’ve heard there’s a cult and they turn into crabs and eat people.” 

You’ve never been to Baltimore. You know you’re supposed to be playing the Crabs on the schedule for next season at some point, and you’re not sure what to believe. You’ve heard a lot of rumors. Half of them from Jess herself.

“Are you worried?” you ask.

She laughs almost frantically, like a rocket is going off. Her hair flies behind her from a wind you can’t see.

“Naaaaaaah! Are you kidding me?”

There’s something unhooked and disconnected behind her eyes. It subsides once the results go through. She’s staying, for now.

The next season has you all on edge, because all the league is talking about is splitting up the Tigers. Somebody scrawls a little hieroglyph of a cat on the away dugout bench in the Pies’ home stadium just when you happen to be playing there. You scowl at it and wish you could still set things on fire by blinking.

Running doesn’t come as easy as it did. You can still do it, but it takes an effort it never used to. You are conscious of every time your feet meet the earth and the sound that follows.

You’re doing alright, for a good while. You get into a rhythm. You finally feel like your bat fits you. You start hanging out at her apartment on the weekends. She has a lot of weird hobbies. She plays an old-looking harp for a few minutes and then walks off, bored. She throws old Viking axes at a wall and just shrugs when you ask her whether the landlord will be mad about it. She falls asleep with her head up against the CRT TV screen she keeps in the corner by the shag carpet, and you see some sort of liquid static clinging to her hair in heavy droplets.

She’s got a pair of batting gloves with the right palm worn through. She always has her hand on her hip just resting on the receiver. You wonder whether it’s uncomfortable or whether it’s just a part of her the way your leaves never bother you but sometimes poke other people in the eye.

You could listen to her tell time travel stories for hours. It’s been a long time since you had someone you just liked to  _ listen  _ to. You find yourself getting caught up in it and you’re almost jealous, like there’s a part of you wondering whether you’ll ever be that interesting. The scar on your back itches and you pull yourself up a little and sit up a little straighter and try to draw confidence from some well deep below. You wonder if she can tell.

“Do you have to plug in and charge when you sleep?” you needle her one evening as she’s putting her hair up with a colorful scrunchie.

“Ask me something like that again and I’ll kick your ass,” she says, but pulls you close in the blankets anyway. As far as you know, there’s no connection to the wall.

She leaves her shoes by the door and you nearly trip over them every time. She sings along to 80’s songs so loud on the team bus and gets Dunlap to do the harmony part and when you startle her in a dark corridor by walking too quietly she beeps something fierce and it’s somehow the cutest thing in the world, and she makes you promise not to tell (everyone already knows.)

——

It’s like this—it’s the first inning of the game against the Pies on day 46. You hit a ground out on your first at-bat and you trudge back to the dugout.

You don’t turn around to look. You’re expecting to hear something—a click, some little beep, that signature ringing. Like you always do. Like always follows.

Instead, you hear a screeching and wailing that makes you throw your hands up over your ears. The sound of the color of fuchsia violet. The feeling of equivalence displacement replacement retrograde causality sonic waves sparks ions but not the type you know something stranger loud building hissing scraping booming till suddenly the barrier breaks and you feel something behind you shift in the air.

You look back. That’s your first mistake.

——

It’s a full month before she even bothers to text you. 

>can you get spears to send me my old record player

>left it in my apartment

You haven’t been over there yet since she left. There’s a part of you that has blocked off the apartment in your mind like a crime scene, with police tape in bright magenta like what still flickers behind your eyes when you try to remember the moment of her leaving too long. Apparently Spears is living there now. You figure they must have helped with the rest of the moving-out.

Your fingers hover over your phone.

>k, i guess, whyd u only think of this now

no, that’s no good, you delete it.

>alright ill throw it on the next train to philly lmao. how is it out there?

too mean. You were never the mean one.

>sure.

You send the message.

\----

You try to spend the rest of the season getting to know your teammates a little better. You realize that you spent a good half of it just following her shadow, waiting for the sound. You carve your own initials into your bat and decide to make it yours even if it doesn’t have a name. 

You realize you and Yaz used to know each other back when you were kids. She got really, really good at pitching after the last election. Like, other-teams-are-looking-at-her good, like Tame good. You figure you should talk to her if she is gonna go somewhere soon. After practice, you chat about the seasons, the local festivals.

About Landry, sometimes. She knew him, apparently, or got to know him, back when she got traded to the team a few years back. They were close, apparently. She puts her hoof on your hand and you feel like you should offer some better sympathy than what you have, which is nothing much.

In truth, Landry had never mentioned her to you, and when he had spoken to other players, you hadn’t always been privy to their conversations. You don’t doubt that they were close, it just is one of those things you never had access to. You feel kind of false hanging around her, because there’s a part of you that can tell she’s hoping to see a flicker of her best friend in your eyes. You keep talking, but something in you feels dishonest.

The finals come and go. The Tigers win again, against the Millenials, and there is a flicker of pride in you. This time, this was a championship you can fully say  _ you _ helped win, with your own arms and legs and bark and intuition, and there’s something in that to be proud of. 

You don’t end up even running into the Pies in the playoffs. They get knocked out by the Jazz Hands in the first round. You wonder offhandedly how Jess feels about that, but don’t think about it more than a second.

It’s like this--the two championship rings tangle together on the chain around your neck. You’re fidgeting with them, anxious, on election day. You’ve spent the beginning of the offseason hanging around with your teammates piled into diners in Hades, Fish shoveling down pancakes and sausage enough to feed three men and Dunlap and Scorpler holding up the ordering line by monologuing about whatever genres they’re respectively into at the moment. Last night, Famous tried to throw onion rings onto Yaz’s antlers like he was playing horseshoes and missed all but one, and you laughed so hard it nearly made you sick, just because you needed something to laugh about.

These are your people, now, you think. If you see that shitty little cat glyph one more time you’re going to punch someone’s face in. You and your teammates stare up at the scoreboard and wait, with bated breath, for the results to come through.

There’s a displacement of air that precedes it, something unbalanced and electric of the wrong sort, and you feel it on the back of your neck and somewhere inside you know the storm above you feels it too. Yaz and Moody are standing beside you one second and lying face down on the ground across the field the next. You all go rushing towards them and you see Yaz has a broken antler on her right side and for a second the only thing you can deliriously think is Famous’s stupid onion ring must have knocked it off before she stands up shaky and sways on her hooves and you have to catch her before she falls forward.

They’re calling it an alternate universe. Yaz--this new Yaz--sees the scar on your back and asks so many questions that Randy has to sit her down and break the news to her about the differences between this world and hers. Moody’s shocked too, but they try to comfort her, and you can’t look either of them in the eye while Yaz sobs.

Apparently it happened across all teams. Nobody else you know personally, though. You try to gather the pieces and weave them back together. It’s strange, losing Yaz but not losing her at all. She still says she knows you from childhood, but you wonder who it was she knew. Whether she was anything like you.

Play must continue. You pick up practicing right away that day. This Yaz isn’t as good as the old one, but nobody has the heart to tell her.

\----

It’s like this--it’s one AM that night and your phone rings from a number you could’ve sworn you deleted.

She’s breathless on the other end of the line and you can tell she’s been crying. It is the first time you have heard her voice at all since the feedback.

“Paula, he’s--”

“Jess, what are you saying? I can’t understand you.”

“He’s gone, oh my god oh my god he’s gone--” she’s frantic, her voice keeps cracking into odd tones and beeps and wails at the end of words and she can barely get them out. “I can’t reach him, I don’t know where he is, he won’t pick up, Paula, he’s gone--”

“Slow down. Are you okay?” It’s a stupid question. And a stupid thing for you to care about. You feel weak for being this concerned, when she hasn’t bothered to even shoot you an “are YOU okay,” or a hello, but you scratch that and shove it down. She’s in a crisis. You can’t just shut that off.

“I can’t shift, it’s not working anymore, I’m stuck like this and I can’t get to him, I don’t know where he is or what happened--”

_ I have a brother out in Dallas _ , you remember her saying. You don’t recall his name.

“Your brother?”

Her only response is this horrible wail, like something stretched out and distorted over a bad connection. You take that as a yes.

You stay silent, for a few moments, and let her cry it out. It feels very strange, to be this close in feeling, with someone who you hooked up with like a year ago and who hasn’t spoken to you in months, but you stay on the line anyway, because you don’t know anything you could say that wouldn’t sound horribly insensitive.

Once she quiets, you try to make your mouth move again, and it feels dry.

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

It feels like an even stupider thing to say, and you’re not sure what you expect her to respond. “Yeah, can I come over?” maybe. “Just stay with me?” maybe.

Instead, she stumbles, still shaky.

“no, not really,” and it’s quiet, so much quieter, her voice is. “sorry.” and she hangs up.

It’s only later that you realize it’s the first time you’ve ever heard her apologize.

\----

Part of you is shocked when you find out what happened to her and Nagomi.

Part of you isn’t surprised at all.

\----

After the fact, people try to say that the Tigers are some sort of anti-necromancy team. Like you were ideologically opposed to the whole idea of it, to her, they cite myth and history about it and everything.

The truth is, you didn’t really care at the time. Not until--not until the day it happened.

You weren’t even thinking about it, during the game. You were thinking more about how Fish was on the Talkers now as of last season and how weird that still was, how weird it was being the only one left of the starting rotation, and you were watching the pitcher toss the ball back and forth between the glove and his hand.

And you felt something--someone--behind you. Someone red-orange electric and storm-cloud strong, someone that you hadn’t felt the presence of in three and a half years.

You’ll try to explain it in a song, later, way later. You can barely explain it to your teammates in the horrible hours after. You feel like if you tried they wouldn’t believe you, or worse, blame you for not warning them.

It’s like this--You felt Landry Violence put his hand on your shoulder but you could not turn around to see him. You could only stand there, frozen in the moment of time slowing down, and hear him say one single word in your ear just a second too late for it to make any difference.

_ Run. _

By the time your bat connects with the ball, the heat at your back has already kicked up. But not from the scar where the jacket used to be. From the dugout. You’re somewhere between first and second base when you get tagged out and realize that you are screaming.

\----

On Monday morning, Jess is pecked out of the shell.

By Friday, her brother is dead.

It’s like this. You have never met him in person, or talked to him. All you know about him is that he is and isn’t her brother, that he replaced someone who Jess knew better than the back of her hand, someone who could bring her to tears with his absence.

But when he comes up to bat you can absolutely see the resemblance--the buttons, for one--but more than anything, you can see his hands are shaking with that telltale black-and-blue distortion, and his eyes are unfocused and he’s humming in the way Jess used to when she was focused but it’s all wrong. There is something horribly wrong with this kid, and everyone knows what it is, and every time he catches a ground out you wince and wait for him to go up in flames.

He does, it takes him seven innings, but he does. You’re on the field, and you see right into the dugout, and you see a flash too bright and smell  _ plastic _ melting and you wonder if miles away wherever she is she felt it.

You feel bad for her, even though you haven’t spoken in who knows how long and no one’s seen her face in nearly a year’s worth of time.

You feel bad for her until you see Yaz stumble and trip and the dust kick up around her hooves and you have a much bigger problem on your hands.

\----

She doesn’t last the week.

\----

It’s like this--it is a year and a half of relative safety for you and your team. Then, Jaylen Hotdogfingers hits four of you in one game.

She doesn’t kill anymore, not that she ever directly killed, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. It feels like someone burned a hole right through you, and you feel like every step you take is three more in four different directions. You can’t even see straight enough to figure out what direction to flip her off.

It’s not fully anger at her that you feel, but she’s definitely one endpoint of it. You can’t help it. The ball left her hand and there’s a part of you that has had enough of trying to rationalize, of trying to be nice and understanding.

The next morning, the anger has not subsided, and your vision is still tinted pink. You nearly careen into Richmond’s soft side before Dunlap has to prop you back up. Mummy looks you over worriedly and Randy claps you on the back and asks if you’re alright. The reverberations from his armored glove make you feel way worse, but you don’t have the heart to tell him.

You are up to bat in the eighth inning, and you hit a foul right into the gully of right field before your vision goes fully violet something fierce and there’s a tether in your chest pulled fully taut and electric like a live wire you squint your eyes shut to get the light out to relieve the pressure and your ears are popping and the sound is screeching above you the thunder above you the storm above you reaches out a hand only a second too late before you faint and wake up sitting on the bench in the Garages dugout with a ringing in your head.

\----

It’s like this--the Tigers lose the season eight finals, and they put that poor kid from the Fridays in a shell.

And they put her back in.

You’re not sure you have the bandwidth to care about it, frankly. I mean, you do, but you don’t--you feel bad, and you can’t even imagine what it must be like, and thinking about it too long makes the grass on your shoulders shiver like goosebumps out of discomfort, makes you stretch your arms far out to the side to prove you still can, but you can’t force yourself to cry about it, even though there’s some part of you that feels like it should be crying.

It’s surprising to you that she still shows up in your dreams. You’d blame it on resonant time travel bullshit if you didn’t know quite well she hadn’t even tried to shift since her brother died.

The Shelled One shows up in the sky again after the finals, and the Garages hoot and holler about it and bang pots and pans and play guitar with a fierceness you’ve never seen, and yell that it better not show its face around here again or we’re gonna knock it straight out of the sky mark our words, fuck you.

It feels a bit like overkill, but then again, you know what the Band’s position on Gods is, and you figure it’s either part of the bit or a way to get their anger out. And gods know, you’re all angry all the time.

Seattle grows on you, though. You find that the grey sky isn’t too different from the dull red-black glow of Erebus, and the rain is good for your skin, as much as you hate to admit it. You go to fancy coffee shops where they make drinks with coffee makers you don’t understand and you hide the top of your mug with your hand to put cream and sugar in it. You pick up the violin, you frown, you ask if they have an electric one, and you make it wail like a demon and it sounds just right.

She’s still on the team, when you are there. She is flickering, but still present, throughout the offseason. You avoid each other for a while, but you’re on the same team, your paths can’t diverge forever.

“You ever think about destiny?” she asks. You’re sitting on the edge of the stadium steps late into the evening after practice. She’s smoking; the other Garages have told her to stop it for her health, but she always tells them she’s dead anyways, so it doesn’t matter.

“Used to,” you say.

“Figures you would.”

“Why’s that?”

“Violence and all. It just figures.”

“Mhm.”

It’s strange, to hear her say it aloud. No one on the Garages has dared even bring it up. Dared mention the broken and frayed feeling you have at your back now, the absence, the lack of a storm overhead.

“I guess some things are destiny,” you say, like a kid trying to explain something she doesn’t understand. “I think the rest is bullshit.”

\----

It’s like this--it is the day of the last game of the finals of season 9. You aren’t in it. Neither is anyone you know--except for Jaylen. The Garages, fraught as their feelings may be about it all, have all gathered in the same section of the stadium to watch and they’re all rooting for the Shoe Thieves.

It’s not the sky going dark that gets to you. Nor is it the crushing feeling of gravity increasing for a second to tenfold times its usual strength, nor is it the whirling of an unseen storm moving faster than you can perceive.

Nor is it the howling of the wind behind Jaylen, alone, on the field, the rest of the Thieves in their positions but still feeling like they are hiding in her shadow. Or the thundering voice of the god overhead in its mocking orbit, though it makes your ears wince.

No, it’s the look on  _ her  _ face, her pristine, perfect face, curly hair still tossed behind her effortlessly like a music video, with that scrunchie she always keeps around her wrist, and the cord wrapping itself up and around her shoulder and down her arm that she holds out with an unnatural strength. She is smiling, so bright and so blinding, and there is something in her eyes that tells you she is drinking this in like nectar, and she looks right at you and smudges her red lipstick across the side of her right cheek with the back of her hand and parts her lips just so to show there is blood on her teeth.

You know what the Band means, now, when they talk about killing gods.

You still can’t get that ringing out of your head.


End file.
